Musical Form and Style in Murriny Patha Djanba Songs at Wadeye (Northwest Australia)

Barwick, Linda. (2011). Musical form and style in Murriny Patha djanba songs at Wadeye (Northwest Australia). In M. Tenzer & J. Roeder (Eds.), Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music (pp. 316–354). Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. This is a postprint version (author’s accepted manuscript) with page numbers adjusted to match the published version. 1 Musical form and style in Murriny Patha djanba songs at Wadeye (Northern Territory, Australia) Linda Barwick One of the most stunning performances I ever witnessed was a djanba ceremony at Peppimenarti near Wadeye in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1998. A group of about forty people, wearing colorful clothes and beautifully painted up with traditional designs, processed towards the building in which a ceremony was shortly to take place to confer a bravery award on a young man who had saved his friend from a crocodile attack. The core of the group was a small ensemble of singers, senior men and women accompanying their songs on resonant ironwood clapsticks. As the melodies repeatedly descended and plateaued, separate groups of male and female dancers alternately surged towards the stage and ebbed back to surround the singers, their footfalls timed by the clapsticks. The combination of energy, grace and group synchrony was breathtaking. Before long I was drawn into an extended engagement with the djanba performers and their families, into grappling to learn a little of the notoriously difficult Murriny Patha language,1 and into a major project to document the songs and their history. This chapter is about the musical form of these djanba songs-- public dance-songs from Australia's northwest Northern Territory--and how they fit into the musical landscape of traditional Australian Indigenous song styles. As several commentators have noted (Nettl 1964; Blum 1992), ethnomusicologists characterize musical style to allow comparison—between different genres, different repertories, or different composers. Two methodological challenges of particular importance to the discipline arise in definition and understanding of style across linguistic and cultural boundaries. These relate to analytical frameworks on the one hand and social meaning on the other. Diversity in musical elements and organizational principles in the selected musical repertories may mitigate against the development of appropriate common analytical terms and frameworks that can operate across them: many ethnomusicologists prefer to describe the internal logic of particular musical practices and traditions, and are wary of imposing a priori categories developed to describe exotic musical cultures. Secondly, in a comparative analysis it may be difficult to do justice to fine-grained differences of social meanings and 1 The sound system used in Murriny Patha is set out in Appendix 1. Note that the final ‘y’ in ‘Murriny’ is not pronounced as a separate syllable. Rather, it signifies that the preceding ‘n’ is to be pronounced as a palatal nasal, like the sound in the middle of the English word ‘onion’, or in the Spanish word ‘señor’. In addition to the efforts of our Wadeye collaborators to teach us about the songs and their significance, I have relied on the ongoing assistance of my linguist collaborators Michael Walsh and Joe Blythe, together with the published work of Chester Street (Street 1987). 317 performance practice, two key concerns of ethnomusicology's 'study of music in culture' (Merriam 1963; Blum 1992). Nevertheless, musical cultures do not exist in a vacuum. Whether through formal or informal contexts for sharing and displaying music face to face, or through globalized media of music commoditization, musicians are not only aware of the musical traditions of their neighbors or exotic others, but frequently react to them, sometimes intensifying the contrasting elements of their own musical practices in order to mark off their own identity, sometimes drawing inspiration from encounters with novel musical practices to generate innovation within their own traditions. Musical style is as much a social fact as it is an analytical concept. In the case of djanba, encounters and exchanges with other musical styles have been of profound importance in its genesis and development. It goes without saying that we cannot access these social meanings of musical style merely by describing the features of musical style. As Stephanie Ross remarks: … the significance of any given feature is contextually limned. We cannot correctly interpret it unless we know the options that were available to the artist, the repertoire from which it was selected. ... The work of previous artists, present conventions, available materials and techniques, and the interests and skills of practising artists are all determinants of style. ... [O]ne factor that should shape our account of general style and its temporal evolution is our background knowledge of the context of creation--what was available to each artist at the time. (Ross 2003) While her observation pertains to critical assessment of general style2 in the visual arts, it applies equally well to the study of style in Western music, as acknowledged by such critics as Meyer and Levinson (Meyer 1989; Levinson 1990). In ethnomusicology, as in the study of past musical cultures, the knowledge of context required to interpret stylistic features depends on the analyst's understanding of performance practice as well as the circumstances surrounding the creation of the piece of music (Blum 1992). The stylistics of djanba in relation to its context of creation and use will come into focus here through close attention to one song. Its composer shaped the song to conform to the established conventions of the djanba genre and to distinguish it from songs belonging to other genres within the community of 2 'General style' is the style of a repertory, an era or a society, as opposed to 'individual style' of an artist or a work 318 Wadeye, while allowing it to continue to interoperate with these genres in a ceremonial context. There are numerous relevant ways to compare djanba style with that of two related genres, junba from the Kimberley region, some hundreds of kilometers to the southwest of Wadeye, and lirrga, another dance-song genre from Wadeye. My discussion of djanba will draw on recordings, interviews and discussions assembled and annotated by the Murriny Patha Song Project,3 a collaboration between elders in the Wadeye community and a research team including linguists and ethnomusicologists. For lirrga and junba, I will rely on two previous projects in which I participated in the 1990s.4 The three examples chosen for comparative analysis originated in a common social and musical milieu. A conventional framework of public dance song performances applied and continues to apply across linguistic and cultural boundaries throughout northern Australia. In both ceremonial and informal performance contexts different song genres are frequently performed together, and even where a single song genre is presented, the audience almost always includes members of other groups, who may even have commissioned the performance. The most fundamental common convention is the organization of the performance around the presentation of a number of song items— stretches of singing with instrumental accompaniment during which dance and other ceremonial action takes place—interspersed with periods of informal discussion or silence. Each song item typically presents a single song topic. Selection and ordering of the items to be performed is the responsibility of the lead singer. Further common conventions apply to the internal structuring of the song items, which will be further discussed below. These common formal conventions provide a technical framework for the stylistic comparison, thus answering the first of the methodological challenges raised above. The second challenge—establishing and interpreting the social meanings of sung performance—is addressed through description of the social situations in which the songs are performed, together with statements about 3 Funded by the Australian Research Council 2004-2008 DP0450131 ‘Preserving Australia's endangered heritages: Murrinh-patha song at Wadeye’, investigators Allan Marett, Michael Walsh, Nicholas Reid and Lysbeth Ford, with co- investigators Linda Barwick and Joe Blythe. 4 Both funded by the Australian Research Council and undertaken in collaboration with Allan Marett: the ARC Large Grants ‘An ethnomusicological study of Lirrga, a genre of Australian Aboriginal song from NW Australia.’ (2001- 2003), and ‘Public performance genres of the northern and eastern Kimberleys’ (1997-1999). 319 style and social meaning of individual songs from knowledgeable performers and composers. In order to understand the context of creation of the djanba song example, we therefore need to understand something of the social history of Wadeye, and the landscape of traditional Australian Indigenous song styles. Social history of djanba The Murriny Patha djanba song genre was created around 1960 in the community of Port Keats (now known as Wadeye), in Australia's Northern Territory by Robert Dungoi Kolumboort, a man of the Dimirnin clan in whose traditional estate the community is situated. While Robert Kolumboort is credited with initiating the repertory, he died before the mid-1960s, and most of the songs in the present repertory were composed by others, including his two brothers Harry Luke Palada Kolumboort and Lawrence Kolumboort. The latter is the composer

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